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Paul Binski (Professor of the History of Medieval Art, University of Cambridge), presents this year’s Hammer Foundation Lecture.

In his talk, Professor Binski takes a skeptical look at recent theories about marginality in Gothic
art and challenges the idea that the margins are the true, perhaps as the only, site of the inventively polymorphous and the richly symbolic.

He argues that modern readings of the marginal are invested in a cultural politics necessarily suspicious of, or even downright hostile to, the high cultural center which it itself seeks to subvert. Instead, he takes a
closer look at small-group humor, markets, law, and the rise of bureaucracy.